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Edward M. House

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Edward Mandell House
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House, 1920
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House, 1920 (credit: Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)
(born July 26, 1858, Houston, Texas, U.S. — died March 28, 1938, New York, N.Y.) U.S. diplomat. An independently wealthy businessman, he served as an adviser to Texas governors (1892 – 1904), one of whom gave him the honorary title of colonel. He was active in the presidential campaign of Woodrow Wilson, later becoming his adviser (1912 – 19). He was the president's chief liaison with the Allies during World War I, and he helped draft the Fourteen Points, which Wilson proposed as the basis for peace at the end of the war. He was a member of the U.S. delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and he worked closely with Wilson in drafting the covenant of the League of Nations.

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Biography: Edward Mandell House
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Edward Mandell House (1858-1938), American diplomat, was President Wilson's most intimate counselor for several years.

Edward M. House was born on July 26, 1858, in Houston, Tex., the son of a prosperous planter and exporter. Edward was educated in England and at Cornell University. After 10 years of managing his inherited properties, he sold them and lived comfortably off the interest and other investments for the rest of his life.

Though outwardly self-effacing, House was driven to become influential. "I have been thought without ambition, " he noted autobiographically. "That … is not quite true. My ambition has been so great that it has never seemed to me worthwhile to strive to satisfy it." In truth, he did try to satisfy it by counseling men of power and by writing a political novel, Philip Dru, Administrator (1911), under a pseudonym. Philip Dru was the story of a man who became dictator of the United States, imposed an enlightened reform program upon the country, and then voluntarily relinquished his power. The hero of the novel, House admitted, "was all that he himself would like to be but was not."

House became the close adviser of a string of Texas politicians. Four times between 1892 and 1902 he successfully managed the campaigns of Texas gubernatorial candidates. In the first of these, he acquired the honorary title "Colonel, " which he kept throughout life.

House supported Woodrow Wilson's successful bid for the presidency in 1912. The key to his relationship with Wilson was his penetrating insight into the President's character and personality. Further, his own views coincided with Wilson's on most substantive issues - House was a conservative progressive in domestic policy and an internationalist in foreign policy - and it seems fair to conclude that he served as much as a confidant and representative of the President as a true counselor. Moreover, he smoothed Wilson's relations with congressional leaders and with the Allied powers both before and after American entry into World War I.

During 1915 and 1916 House performed the fruitless task of sounding out the British, French, and Germans on ending the war through mediation. He concluded that the United States should expand its armed forces, and he may have influenced Wilson's decision to come out for "preparedness" in 1915. When the United States entered the war, House became chief of the American mission to London and Paris, serving as the President's spokesman. He also took charge of the preparations for the Paris Peace Conference and drew up a preliminary draft of the League of Nations Covenant. House's most striking success was in persuading the Allies to accept Wilson's Fourteen Points program as the basis for peace shortly before the armistice.

As one of the five members of the United States peace commission in Paris, House continued to consult intimately with the President. He evidently persuaded the President to be conciliatory toward the British and French; yet Wilson was already beginning to turn against House. After June 1919 House and Wilson never saw each other again; nor did the President respond to House's urgent recommendation to compromise with the Republican moderates during the Senate fight over ratification of the League of Nations.

House continued to play a behind-the-scenes role in Democratic politics until his death in New York City on March 28, 1938, but his influence was negligible. His wife and two daughters survived him.

Further Reading

For House's own story, Charles Seymour, ed., The Intimate Papers of Colonel House (4 vols., 1926-1928), is indispensable. House lacks a full-scale biography, but a perceptive work is Alexander L. George and Juliette L. George, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (1956). See also Rupert Norval Richardson, Colonel Edward M. House, vol. 1: The Texas Years (1964). The interested reader should also consult the many works of the Wilson scholar Arthur S. Link, including Woodrow Wilson (1963).

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Edward Mandell House
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House, Edward Mandell, 1858-1938, American political figure, adviser to President Wilson, b. Houston. Active in Texas politics, he was (1882-92) campaign manager and adviser to Gov. James Hogg and his successors. He was known as "Colonel" House because of a Texas state office he held. He met Woodrow Wilson in 1911 and helped him secure (1912) the Democratic presidential nomination. After Wilson's election House became the President's closest adviser. He often served as the President's liaison with members of the administration and important men in the country. Greatly interested in foreign affairs, he was sent to Europe in 1914 in an attempt to prevent the outbreak of war and again in 1915 to propose a peace conference. After U.S. entry into World War I, he was U.S. representative at the conference for coordinating Allied activities. House also gathered data for the peace conference, was American delegate to negotiate the armistice, and was a member of the U.S. peace commission. He helped to draft the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant of the League of Nations. More conciliatory and realistic than Wilson at the peace conference, his friendship with Wilson ended in 1919 because of conflict on the conduct of the negotiations. House and Charles Seymour edited the documentary What Really Happened at Paris (1921). Some of his papers, selected and edited by Seymour as The Intimate Papers of Colonel House (2 vol., 1926-28), are a valuable historical source.

Bibliography

See A. D. H. Smith, The Real Colonel House (1918) and Mr. House of Texas (1940); A. MacPhail, Three Persons (1929); A. L. George and J. George, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House (1956, repr. 1964).

Wikipedia: Edward M. House
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 This Edward M. House is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. WikiProject Biography/Politics and government may be able to help recruit one. (November 2008)
Edward M. House, from An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 by William Orpen, 1921. Plate LXXXV

Edward Mandell House (July 26, 1858 – March 28, 1938) was an American diplomat, politician, and presidential advisor. Commonly known by the purely honorific title of Colonel House, although he had no military experience, he had enormous personal influence with U.S. President Woodrow Wilson as his foreign policy advisor until Wilson removed him in 1919.

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Biography

Colonel Edward Mandell House (originally "Huis" which became "House") was born in Houston, Texas. House was educated in New England prep schools and went on to study at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1877, but he was forced to drop out when his father died. He married Loulie Hunter on 4 August 1881. On his return to Texas, House ran his family's business. He eventually sold the cotton plantations, and invested in banking. House moved to New York City about 1902.

In 1912, House published anonymously a novel called Philip Dru: Administrator, in which the title character, Dru, leads the democratic western U.S. in a civil war against the plutocratic East, becoming the dictator of America. Dru as dictator imposes a series of reforms which resemble the Bull Moose platform of 1912 and then vanishes. [Lash pp 230-35]

He became active in Texas politics and served as an advisor to President Woodrow Wilson, particularly in the area of foreign affairs. House functioned as Wilson's chief negotiator in Europe during the negotiations for peace (1917-1919), and as chief deputy for Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference.

House helped to make four men governor of Texas: James S. Hogg (1892), Charles A. Culberson (1894), Joseph D. Sayers (1898), and S. W. T. Lanham (1902). After the election House acted as unofficial advisor to each governor. Hogg gave House the title "Colonel" by promoting House to his staff.

House became a close friend and supporter of New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson in 1911, and helped him win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1912. He became an intimate of Wilson and helped set up his administration. House was offered the cabinet position of his choice (except for Secretary of State which was already pledged to William Jennings Bryan) but declined, choosing instead "to serve wherever and whenever possible." House was even provided living quarters within the White House. After Wilson's first wife died in 1914, the President was even closer to House. However, Wilson's second wife, Edith, of whom he had commissioned the Swiss-born American artist Adolfo Müller-Ury (1862-1947) to paint a portrait in 1916, disliked House, and his position weakened. House threw himself into world affairs, promoting Wilson's goal of brokering a peace to end World War I. He spent much of 1915 and 1916 in Europe, trying to negotiate peace through diplomacy. He was enthusiastic but lacked deep insight into European affairs and was misled by British diplomats. After the sinking of the Lusitania on 7 May 1915, tension escalated with Germany and U.S. neutrality was precarious. House decided the war was an epic battle between democracy and autocracy; he argued the United States ought to help Britain and France win a limited Allied victory. However, Wilson still insisted on neutrality.

House played a major role in shaping wartime diplomacy. Wilson had House assemble "The Inquiry"—a team of academic experts to devise efficient postwar solutions to all the world's problems. In September 1918, Wilson gave House the responsibility for preparing a constitution for a League of Nations. In October 1918, when Germany petitioned for peace based on the Fourteen Points, Wilson charged House with working out details of an armistice with the Allies.

House helped Wilson outline his Fourteen Points, and worked with the president on the drafting of the Treaty of Versailles and the Covenant of the League of Nations. House served on the League of Nations Commission on Mandates with Lord Milner and Lord Robert Cecil of Great Britain, M. Simon of France, Viscount Chinda of Japan, Guglielmo Marconi for Italy, and George Louis Beer as adviser. On May 30, 1919 House participated in a meeting in Paris, which laid the groundwork for establishment of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Throughout 1919, House urged Wilson to work with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge to achieve ratification of the Versailles Treaty.

However, the conference revealed serious policy disagreements between Wilson and House. Even worse were personality conflicts. Wilson had become much more intolerant and systematically broke with one after another of his closest advisors. When Wilson returned home in February 1919, House took his place on the Council of Ten where he negotiated compromises unacceptable to Wilson. In mid-March 1919, Wilson returned to Paris and lost confidence in House, relegating him to the sidelines.

In the 1920s, House strongly supported U.S. membership in the League of Nations and the World Court, the Permanent Court of International Justice.

In 1932, House supported Franklin D. Roosevelt without joining the inner circle. Although he became disillusioned with the New Deal, he did not express his reservations in public.

House died on March 28, 1938 in New York City, following a bout with pleurisy. He is buried at Glenwood Cemetery in Houston. House Park, a high school football stadium in Austin, Texas, stands on House's former horse pasture.

A statue of House stands in Park Skaryszewski in Warsaw, in honor of "a noble spokesman for the Polish cause."

A portrait of Loulie Hunter House by Adolfo Müller-Ury is in a private US collection.

References

  • George, Alexander L. and Juliette George (1964). Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study. Dover Publications. ISBN 0-486-21144-4. 
  • Godfrey Hodgson. Woodrow Wilson's Right Hand : The Life of Colonel Edward M. House (2006), the standard biography
  • Lasch, Christopher. The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (1965)
  • Charles E. Neu. "House, Edward Mandell"; American National Biography 2000. online
  • Richardson, Rupert N., Colonel Edward M. House: The Texas Years 1964 [1]
  • Arthur Walworth, Wilson and His Peacemakers: American Diplomacy at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 (1986)

Primary sources

See also

External links

Search Wikisource Wikisource has original works written by or about: Edward M. House


Awards and achievements
Preceded by
Herbert L. Pratt		 Cover of Time Magazine
25 June 1923		 Succeeded by
Andrew Mellon

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